The saga continues

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I’m not even sure where to begin to describe the last week, but I guess the beginning is as good a place as any. About two months ago I completed my application to teach in South Korea in February next year and realised that I didn’t want to spend the interceding six months sitting around London. I started looking around online to see if there were any short-term placements I could do (not holding out much hope since most contracts are a minimum of one year) and that’s how I came across the TLG programme. For those of you who want to look at it in detail the website gives a lot of information (www.tlg.gov.ge ) but long story short, it’s an initiative set up by the Georgian government to bring English speakers to Georgia to co-teach in their public schools and share their culture with Georgian families and school children. It appealed to me for several reasons. I’m not trying to set myself up as a fucking saint here but I’ve always liked the idea of volunteering. Apart from anything else it helps to ease the mild feelings of guilt I have about the fact that the main reason I chose to apply to South Korea is for the money. I also knew absolutely nothing about Georgia (I’ve now been here for over a week and I’m still not convinced I do now!) but the more I looked into it the more fascinating it seemed to be. For those of you interested in the practicalities of it, TLG pays for your return flight, provides a week of training, arranges for you to stay with a host family and pays you 500 Lari a month. This is about £200 – not very much to us but well above the average salary for a teacher here, so whilst they call it volunteering anyone taking part in the programme should be perfectly comfortable here.
Before I go any further I’d like to apologise in advance for the length of this post – it’s almost impossible to find time to write during orientation and there’s a lot to fit in. On top of that two of the reasons I’m writing this blog are to provide as much practical information as possible to those thinking of coming out here to teach and partly as a kind of diary for myself because my memory is shot to shit and I’d like to be able to look back on this in a year and actually remember what I did!
So, back to where I left off last time. My new best friend insisted on giving me his number (twice) and said he would like to show me around Tbilisi. Now whilst this would normally put me on my guard I’d read a hell of a lot about the famous Georgian hospitality before I came out here so I decided to reserve judgement. He insisted on carrying something of mine through customs which actually turned out to be the bag of duty free gifts I had bought for my family and then effectively held them hostage until we got all the way over to the TLG information desk. He finally relinquished them and left after making me promise to call him. Our TLG coordinator, Tamara, then told me he had asked her what hotel we were staying in and that she had refused to tell him so I guess that’s that question answered!
We hung around the airport for about two hours waiting for everybody to congregate, change money etc. I got talking to a few of my fellow volunteers and everyone seemed really nice. Most of them had come from the States and had been travelling for two plus days so I decided I’d better shut up about my meagre 12-hour journey. We finally got everybody aboard the coach and headed off towards the hotel. By this point it’s about 4.30am but everyone’s on different time zones anyway. There’s not much chance to see anything on the way to the hotel but my first impression is of a lot of crumbling Soviet style apartment blocks. Oh, and the crazy drivers of course. We’ve been warned about them but fortunately the roads are pretty quiet given the early hour (although we do have to swerve around some crazy fucker who’d decided to step out of his car for a breath of fresh air in the middle of the motorway. We finally arrive and check into our rooms, by which point it’s about 6am. It’s actually a really nice hotel (we’re later told it costs $120 a night! The cost of accommodation here seems to be completely out of proportion with the cost of, well, everything else. One of the other volunteers says it reminds him of the hotel in The Shining but I’ve only read the book so I can’t comment.) We’ve been handed a schedule that informs us that breakfast is in three hours. We’re sharing rooms, which was what I expected, but at the same time I’m concerned because I’ve always had trouble sleeping when there’s someone else in the room with me. I thought they would have pre-allocated us rooms but it turns out they’re doing it on the basis of whomever you happen to be standing next to when you reach the reception desk. In my case it’s a lady called Jane from LA who turns out to be down to earth, considerate and a lot of fun so I guess I got lucky there. We finally fall into bed and try to sleep. I lie there for the rest of the night wondering what tomorrow will bring.

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